As newly approved redistricted legislative district boundary plans are released our spatial analysis team has been running compactness analysis on each one (see Daniel McGlone’s recent blog on his analysis of the approved PA congressional boundaries – http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/2011/12/pennsylvania-congressional-redistricting-we-have-a-plan/). Our growing collection of official, state-approved legislative district boundaries is not just tickling our intellectual fancy – We are also methodically adding the new boundary files to our Cicero API data collection and making it available through a new call we’ve recently added to the API.

This new call has proven to be a big hit with organizations wanting to preemptively match their constituents to the districts they will belong to when the new district boundaries take effect.  This enables organizations to prepare their constituent databases for rapid call-to-action campaigns directed at new legislatures, analyze their constituents by districts for the next election cycle, and more.

To use the GeocodingService or MapGeneration service to access newly drawn districts based on the 2010 census:

• Simply append the suffix “_2010″ to the DistrictType parameter in any method (for example, you would use the DistrictType NATIONAL_LOWER_2010 to see the new House districts and STATE_UPPER_2010 to see new State Senate districts).
• ALL_2010 will return all the new districts available for any given location.
• If new districts are not yet available for a given location, the SOAP response will not return district responses for the location.

We are tracking when each state’s new legislature officially takes office (in the majority of cases, this is when the new boundaries take effect). As each state takes office, we will be moving the 2010 boundaries to the current boundary dataset.  In other words, keep using the DistrictType calls the way you are using them now and we will do the updating work for you!

New states will continue to be added as we receive and process the data.

Questions?  Feel free to contact us: http://www.azavea.com/products/cicero/contact/

At first glance we were taken aback, most notably by District 7, which got more “Wow what is that?” remarks in the office than the earthquake. There is a lot to say about this monstrosity, certain to be a poster child for future gerrymandering studies. We’ve been able to perform some basic GIS analysis on the new districts today and will present some findings below. Next week, we’ll write about some of the methods used to create the numbers we are presenting.

First off, here’s the numbers you have been waiting for: compactness, demographics and voting tendency for the current and proposed congressional districts:

UPDATE 12/19/2011: We have added statistics for the Democratic congressional redistricting proposal:

As you can see, using both the Polsby-Popper and Schwartzberg methods of calculating district compactness (read up about how those are calculated by taking a look at our gerrymandering white paper), the proposed congressional districts are slightly less compact than the districts currently in effect. While that may not seem like a lot, keep in mind that Pennsylvania’s current districts are already some of the least compact in the nation, according to our study. District 7, represented by Patrick Meehan (R), takes the honor of having the eighth least compact congressional district in the nation. Of all the newly drawn congressional districts, it is the fifth least compact in the nation. Have a look for yourself:

District 7 snakes its way through southeastern Pennsylvania in five counties. In some cases, the district is as narrow as 800 feet across, like here along the Pennsylvania turnpike:

In a matter of seconds, you could drive in three separate congressional districts, without even speeding! But I hope you brought your boat, or at least a swimsuit. Just a few miles northeast of there outside Norristown, District 7 leaps across the Schuylkill river. To stay in the district, you’ll need to cross – but there’s no bridge.

Why are the lines so screwy? We could speculate that it may be for incumbent protection. In its new form, District 7 now has a GOP advantage by almost four points, reversing the five point Democratic advantage in the current plan. One thing is for certain: it looks like we’ll have plenty of material for another gerrymandering study. If you want to stay up to date on all of our redistricting work, follow the Cicero team on twitter.

Learn more by joining our DistrictBuilder webinar on Wednesday, November 30th at 2 PM EST.

Learn more by joining our DistrictBuilder webinar on Wednesday, November 30th at 2 PM EST.

Learn more by joining our DistrictBuilder webinar on Wednesday, November 30th at 2 PM EST.

Learn more by joining our DistrictBuilder webinar on Wednesday, November 30th at 2 PM EST.

Learn more by joining our DistrictBuilder webinar on Wednesday, November 30th at 2 PM EST.

Fix Philly Districts was a collaborative effort between several local organizations:  WHYY NewsWorks, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com and Penn Project for Civic Engagement.  While the DistrictBuilder software has been used to support competitions in Virginia and Arizona, this Philadelphia implementation was the first time it was being used for a municipal public redistricting competition.

The competition ran for only a few weeks in August, but we were overwhelmed by the degree of engagement by the public.  We had participants from all over the United States, and almost 500 people registered to use the application.  More than 1,200 plans were started, and more than 70 complete plans were submitted to the leaderboards.  The final competition garnered submissions from 31 teams or individuals.  Representatives from each of the partners reviewed these plans and selected several winners.

But there are larger questions here.  In particular, was this worthwhile?  Did it have an impact?  To answer that question, let’s look at where we started.

The Contest

In the last three rounds of redistricting, Philadelphia has developed progressively more convoluted and gerrymandered districts with the process after the 2000 census resulting in two districts there were among the least compact local municipal districts in the United States (check out our Redistricting White Paper and Philadelphia Supplement if you want to read more about how that was determined) and redistricting had historically been carried out behind closed doors.  This past spring both the Mayor Michael Nutter and City Council committed to a more open process and promised at least four public hearings to be held in the neighborhoods that would be most impacted.  But by early August, there were no hearings scheduled and the new district plan was due on September 9.

We launched Fix Philly Districts on August 3 and within days, City Council announced a public hearing … to be held at City Hall… in the morning… on a weekday… in August.  There wasn’t much chance that was going to result in much airing of opinions from the public.  But that did not mean the public wasn’t interested.  On Monday, August 8, our partners held a civic workshop event at WHYY.  More than 120 people showed up – it was standing room only.  Two members of Council (Sanchez and Green) attended and, to their credit, stayed through the entire event, both participating and contributing ideas for how to improve the redistricting process.  Ms. Sanchez was particularly supportive and offered to make time for the winners of the contest to present their plans at a future hearing.

Many news media outlets took Council to task for not providing more opportunities for public participation in the process.  Two more hearings were scheduled, this time in the neighborhoods and in the evening so that it would be easier for people to attend.  Azavea presented a sampling of the Fix Philly Districts submissions at the first event and the winners presented their own plans at the second event.

Council Releases a Plan

Council announced two slight variations on a plan on September 9, only a day after the second of the neighborhood hearings.  Both of the proposed plans are improvements on what we have had in Philadelphia for the past 10 years.  Both of these plans got a few things right:

• The two most egregiously gerrymandered districts are much improved, resulting in a plan that is somewhat more compact
• There is a more compact and identifiable Latino district
• There is a more recognizable set of “river wards” along the Delaware River

On the other hand, these plans do not come close to the standard set by the Fix Philly Districts competitors.  Some of the craziness includes:

• The 5th District still leaps across Broad Street and deep into the east side of town – this is clearly designed to simply incorporate Darrell Clarke’s home into his district, but significantly fragments the neighborhoods east of Broad St.
• The 5th District dips deep into Center City to capture Rittenhouse Square, Spring Garden and Fairmount neighborhoods.  This is entirely unnecessary and significantly fragments the neighborhoods NW of center city
• The 1st District spans the natural barrier of the Schuylkill River and ends up grouping SW Philadelphia with South Philadelphia, sections of the City that have little in terms of common interests
• The 3rd District dips down into the SW
• The 8th District has an appendage on its east edge that seems odd

These are strange moves, except in light of where the incumbents live.  Council developed a somewhat better plan, but it essentially remains an incumbency protection plans.  I am also surprised (though perhaps not that much) that the two plans represent almost identical concepts with only a few divisions moved around in each.  These aren’t really choices that would enable the public to have a real debate.

Did we have an impact?

This isn’t a typical Azavea project: there is no funding to support it; all of the partners did the work pro bono; and while our Cicero API and the work we’ve done on DistrictBuilder is clearly engaged with the geographic elements of the democratic process, Azavea does not usually wade into the actual scrum of politics.  Was it worth it?  Did we really have an impact?

Our ultimate goal would be to change the rules so that redistricting is taken out of City Council’s hands – I strongly believe that an independent redistricting process  is the only way to ensure a fair and transparent process that reflects the public’s interests, rather than Council members’ interests. But we were not so naive as to believe that was going to happen.  Did we change the way that Council acted or change the outcome of the redistricting process?  I think we did.  With some help from active coverage by the news media, we at least accomplished the following:

• We shamed Council into scheduling first one public hearing and then two more, enabling many more voices to be heard.
• Council delivered a plan that was not completely embarrassing and did so on time.

So City Council didn’t produce an embarrassing plan, and that’s a victory?  I actually think we did much more.   We successfully demonstrated that, given some online tools, there are hundreds of people that are sufficiently interested in the redistricting process to commit hours of their time to drawing their own districts plans.  And they did that in the middle of August, during a hurricane, several storms, an earthquake and anxiety about the Phillies.  The best ten or so of the plans submitted to the contest were better than what Council developed from many perspectives.  And I do believe that the scrutiny probably prevented some of the excesses that we saw after the last census.

Not the end of the story

And I suspect this particular redistricting story will continue.  Council has adopted one of the two plans and the mayor has signed it, but there is nothing to prevent this one from being tweaked.  An amendment proposing additional changes has already been introduced, there will be five new district council members inaugurated in January all of whom will likely have their own ideas.  Indeed, this new plan will not actually be used until the election of 2015, providing lots of opportunities for fiddling.

But I think we can say doubt that the public process represented by the Fix Philly Districts contest demonstrates, without a doubt, that the many members of the public want to be engaged in a civic dialogue, both with their elected representatives and with each other.  They will work hard to do so.  And our democracy can be better for it.

The proposal has met with marked controversy from some groups in Ohio. Here’s a look at how the districts shape up using two measures of compactness, Polsby-Popper and Schwartzberg. For more detailed information on how each is calculated and why compactness is important for legislative districts, see Azavea’s Redistricting 2010 White Paper.

First, it’s important to note that in the proposed plan the target population is met for each of the districts to within one person. However, this is not without its drawbacks when it comes to compactness. It appears that the redrawing has resulted in much less compact districts overall. Note that the statewide average is now considerably lower using the Polsby-Popper and Schwartzberg methods of measuring compactness. If these districts went into effect today, Ohio on average would have some of the least compact congressional districts in the nation. The Midwest Democracy Network, which recently held a redistricting competition in Ohio, said that the proposed plan scores lower than any of their user submitted plans.

A Closer Look: District 15

Perhaps one of the most interesting changes comes in the form of District 15 in Central Ohio, represented by freshmen Representative Steven Strivers. The district is transformed from a compact area representing much of Columbus city and its western suburbs to a meandering one that snakes from northeast of Dayton to over 100 miles east before reversing direction and heading back west.

How does the district expand to all this new geographic territory? By removing much of the densely populated areas of Columbus. But the district still does include certain slivers of the city, such as a finger that extends into downtown. The district is also barely contiguous as its boundaries weave in and out of the city limits. In one part of Southwest Columbus, a sliver of the district is only as wide as a major roadway, skipping over a shopping center to include a car dealership on the other side.

What do you think? Join the conversation by following the Cicero Twitter account. Throughout the next several weeks we’ll be following up with redistricting across the U.S. on this blog and our Twitter.

This isn’t a typical Azavea project: there is no funding to support it – all of the partners are doing the work pro bono; and while our Cicero API and the work we’ve done on DistrictBuilder is clearly engaged with the geographic elements of the democratic process, Azavea does not usually wade into the actual scrum of politics.

So, why get involved?  In 2006, using our Cicero database of global legislative districts, Azavea released the results of an internal research project on legislative district compactness in the form of a Gerrymandering White Paper.  In 2010 we released a revised version of the research, this time in the context of the 2010 Census and the 2011 redistricting process.  Both studies revealed that Azavea’s home town, Philadelphia, has some of the most contorted local council districts in the United States. We want to leverage the DistrictBuilder software we’ve been creating over the past year to make a contribution toward changing this poor showing.

In Philadelphia, the redistricting process is controlled by City Council.  We believe that the best government is one in which citizens are engaged in the democratic process, and drawing the lines that determine how our representatives will be elected is a critical part of this process.  We have created FixPhillyDistricts.com to both enable the public to learn about redistricting and to encourage public engagement in the process.  The effort is also meant to demonstrate that an open, public process based upon objective criteria can produce fair, legal council districts in Philadelphia.

How can you help?  Take a few minutes to visit FixPhillyDistricts.com.  From there you can do two things: 1) you can create an account and draw a Philadelphia City Council district plan (even if you don’t live in Philadelphia); and  2) using the social media buttons available on the site, help the Fix Philly Districts partners tell other civic-minded organizations, researchers, and members of the public that web-based, collaborative and public redistricting is a reality that can be implemented in other cities, counties, and states.  Together, we can redraw the map on redistricting.

Key Dates for Fix Philly Districts Competition

• Wed, August 3, 2011 – Competition Opened
• Mon, August 8, 2011, 7pm – Public Workshop at WHYY – 150 N 6th St – RSVP to 215-898-1112 or LindaBre@gse.upenn.edu
• Thurs, August 11, 2011, 6:30pm – DistrictBuilder Training Webinar – Register
• Sun, August 28, 2011, 11:59pm – Competition Ends
• Early September (TBD) – Winners Announced

More about Fix Philly Districts

We are really encouraged by the amount of press coverage the project has already received. You can see a roundup of local coverage in the Azavea News Room.

More about DistrictBuilder

DistrictBuilder, the software that powers the Fix Philly Districts site, was developed in collaboration with leading redistricting experts at the Public Mapping Project.  It is open source, which means that the software is transparent and available to anyone to build their own redistricting web site. Azavea folks are also available should you be interested in an online redistricting project in your area. In collaboration with the Public Mapping Project, we will be continuing to add new features and capabilities over the next several months.